Kitchen Queries

Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions. We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

Please note, we are only able to answer questions selected for publication and aren't able to enter into personal correspondence.

Latest Queries

'CUP' Measurements

Many of your recipes have 'cup' measurements. What is a cup equal to in ounces or millilitres?

Posted by importchick. Answered on 13th Jul 2011 at 12.00

From the nigella team:

Cup measurements are given in the American versions of Nigella's books as in the US cup measures are the more common form of cooking measurements. Some Australians also use cup measures for certain items. For the US a cup is 240mls or 16 tablespoons. The US also define a cup as 8 ounces though this is slightly larger than the UK measure of 8 fluid ounces.For Australia a cup is 250mls but as there is only as small difference between US and Australian cups they tend to be treated as the same.

Sometimes cup measures are given as heaped/heaping or scant. A heaping cup is 1 cup plus 1-2 tablespoons (for liquid measures it is called a generous cup) and a scant cup is 1 cup minus 1-2 tablespoons.

We have already posted some basic conversions from cups to weight for common items like flour and sugar. Also if you go into the Recipes section of the website and click on a recipe then you will se a button at the bottom of the recipe labelled as "Equivalents and Conversions". If you click on this button it will bring up a pop-up which shows most of the common conversions which should also help.